If you are worried about the state of the world but keep telling yourself there is nothing you can do, that’s just not true. A very useful thing to do would be to click on over to Zero to Go’s fundraising campaign to help jumpstart a composting operation in Beacon.

Zero to Go is an education-based waste management company. You may have seen their waste barrels or work bicycles at one of Beacon’s river festivals, or the sheep festival in Rhinebeck, or one of the many other events they work at to divert refuse from the landfill or the incinerator via re-using, recycling, and composting.

Composting is arguably the most helpful and important component of our waste management problem. Unlike recycling, which uses a lot of energy to get the stuff tossed into those orange-topped green cans back into something useful (or, just as likely, something not so useful), composting is pretty much all good. Using air and microbes, it creates its own highly useful product, nutrient-rich soil. And that is something we are quickly running out of here on our planet, having destroyed, removed, or contaminated fully half of it in the last 150 years.

Ultimately, composting, like recycling before it, will be mandated. Already many cities, and the state of Vermont, have mandatory rules in place or being phased in. This in turn is creating the opportunity for enterprising local small businesses in San Francisco, Burlington, VT, and New Paltz, NY. Let’s get Beacon on the list of places looking to the future while supporting a local business entrepreneur. There is no better time than today!

Zero to Go’s Beacon Compost Project is launching Phase I shortly. From the website:

Phase One (the pilot):

• Zero to Go staff will collect food waste from homes and businesses with electric-assist cargo bicycles that can handle up to 1,000 lbs.
• Staff will pedal the loads to our staging area near Main Street and place what’s been collected into large totes.
• Every week, Empire Zero, our partner carting company, will pick up Beacon’s collected material and drop it off at farms and industrial compost facilities in the area.

Ultimately, Zero to Go owner Sarah Womer envisions a greatly expanded service and more jobs, as well as composting infrastructure based in Beacon. Compost Culture is coming. Be a pioneer. It won’t save the world, but it will turn your food scraps into black gold, and reduce the crap off-gassing in the landfill.

Click here to support the Beacon Compost Project